The Illegible Book
Course Code: 25FAT000V
This four-week, virtual workshop takes place on Zoom on Tuesdays, November 18th - December 9th, from 10AM to 12PM ET.
- Tuesday, November 18th, 10AM to 12PM ET
- Tuesday, November 25th, 10AM to 12PM ET
- Tuesday, December 2nd, 10AM to 12PM ET
- Tuesday, December 9th, 10AM to 12PM ET
Please Note: Registration for this workshop closes on November 4th, at 11:59 pm Eastern Time.
About the Workshop
In this virtual workshop for all experience levels, Instructor Shirin Salehi will introduce the participants to non-legible books through an extensive one-month discussion on legibility and hiddenness in artwork in book form. Starting with an introduction on illegibility through examples of Asemic Writing, the instructor will propose works intentionally deciphered, unreadable, and inaccessible, through a selection of case studies of Artist’s books and artworks in order to raise questions on what lies beneath the hidden language.
The course is designed to deepen reflection and poetical reasoning. All students are encouraged to actively participate in discussions throughout the workshop. The class will be divided by discussion of case studies and critiques. Though the theory discussion is the basis of the class’s structure, the instructor will work with each participant on their ideas and intuitions in order to create the initial structure of the personal Artist’s book project.
The course is open to artists, poets, thinkers, and all creative individuals interested in participating in critique and theoretical discussions related to book arts and to artworks with a specific emphasis on bookness.
About the Instructor
Born in Tehran in 1982, Shirin Salehi is a visual artist, teacher and translator. Her work explores media such as printmaking, sculpture, video, artist's books and writing, and investigates different dimensions of language, from notions such as time and matter, to its consubstantial spheres such as erasure, the hidden and illegibility. Her artistic research also embraces literature and text-based works with a special attention to the notion of bookness. She teaches at the the Center for Book Arts in New York where she has designed numerous critical development workshops about artists' books and LENS school of Visual Arts in Madrid where she teaches poetical reasoning. Shirin has been an artist-in-residence at the Academy of Spain in Rome, the Academy of France in Madrid (2014) and was nominated for the Queen Sonja Print Award in Norway (2022).
All images courtesy of the instructor.